Our music coverage remains heavily titled toward indie rock, punk, garage rock, and post-hardcore. Hip-hop probably comes next, but while Oddisee, Black Indian, and Pro'Verb got squibs in print—and X.O. got a full review—plenty of the year's most notable mixtapes never got mentioned beyond Arts Desk. I'd like to see more full-fledged mixtape reviews in 2012, especially since the line separating mixtapes from albums keeps getting blurrier and blurrier.

Two of the biggest success stories in local EDM didn't nab print mentions (although they were all over Arts Desk): Volta Bureau and the Future Times label. Oops. We missed some notable experimental releases, too. Our go-go coverage was mostly pitiful. And not enough of [Mike] West's and Mike Paarlberg's and Steve Kiviat's excellent online jazz and classical and world-music coverage (respectively) migrated to our weekly edition.

Then I added this parenthetical: "For the most part, we ignored the area's abundance of pop-folksy singer/songwriters, but, yeah, that won't change in 2012."

Fast-forward three weeks, and some local singer/songwriters are strumming a sad tune about the remark. Scroll to the bottom of the comments on my earlier post.

One musician, Ted Garber, took me to task on Twitter (actually, he called me "#douche"). Then he sent me this note:

Dear Jon,

Per our volley on #Twitter:

I find your recent comments from December 2011's WCP issue indefensible. The first time I ever heard about the Washington City Paper was from the "area's abundance of pop-folksy singer-songwriters" who vehemently encouraged me to read and support it when I started as a full-time professional musician in 1996. I still remember the full-length features written on some of my first mentors, including Kevin James and Daryl Davis. These same types of artists founded and continue to fund The Washington Area Music Association (WAMA) and The Songwriter's Association of Washington (SAW). I am well aware that, as with any editor's desk, you and your staff have biases. However, admitting to one's inclinations is not the same as flippantly bragging about them–mocking hardworking professional artists with open disdain for their craft. Moreover, rather than confessing to an inherent bias which you seek to counter, you proffer that you and your staff plan on continuing this predisposition throughout the coming year: "Yeah, that's not going to change in 2012." You, sir, made it personal. Hence, it should come as no surprise that so many have taken it personally.

I would expect more from a paper that so many of my own clan helped to tout and proliferate. Furthermore, I am truly shocked and furious that a chief section editor would not only permit such a lop-sided leaning among his own staff but that he would have the Capital City know that the bias is grossly intentional and perpetual. Your comments mock and defame an entire faction of our city's rich and eclectic musical heritage.

I am not writing out of sour grapes–some "reckoning" for the feature article or album review I never received. I am fortunate to have made a living solely from music since 1996 without any help from The City Paper, not even a plug or an honorable mention. No, I am writing to you out of respect and admiration for my fellow "pop-folksy singer songwriters" that you consciously ignore. As with any other professional artists, these people often work exceedingly hard in exchange for little to no pay. As with artists in every other genre, they devote their time and their efforts to a career path most deem too difficult or too thankless. They don't choose the genre of music that radiates from their soul any more than a person chooses his or her sexual orientation. They are following their compass. They make joyful noise for the world. It is their calling. It is mine. If you clearly do not intend to aid in this calling, at least do your best not to hinder it. We are all part of Washington's music community. Should we not be able to look to our local media outlets as a resource?

I hope you will consider my comments as a fellow member of the local music community and someone who has always had great respect for the long-standing Washington City Paper. I hope its fine tradition endures. I go on record thus.

Sincerely,

Ted Garber

Here's what I told Garber:

My personal tastes aside, I'm honestly not opposed to City Paper covering, critically, any genre that's made locally. (Certainly, as a reporter and not a critic, I try to write a lot about the economics of every kind of local art.) But because my reviewers are generally pretty specialized, there are sounds that we favor and sounds that we end up ignoring (indeed, consciously). If a critic with the right chops and the right voice wanted to write about singer-songwriters for City Paper, I'd be open to it; it hasn't happened in the two years I've had the job. So, in all likelihood, "yeah, that's not going to change in 2012."

So there you have it.

Washington City Paper: Can you describe your strip to attract a new reader who have never seen it?

Shawn Belschwender: There's a little guy at the center of it coping or not coping with the failures and frustrations of his life, or, often, entirely denying them to himself. He has a pal, with his own problems, offering guidance. They push forward, harboring a lot of delusions about themselves and their little world. Their pronouncements should delight you and maybe perturb you. If that's not too gross a statement. Clowntime Comics are supposed to be at least amusing.

WCP: When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?

SB: I was born in 1966 in New Jersey. I grew up in northern New Jersey, in West Milford Township.

When I was 12, I went to Saturday classes at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, in Dover, N.J. (which is not too far away from where I lived). Joe Kubert is best known for his work on Sgt. Rock for DC Comics. I was in the throes of Star Wars fandom at the time, so I was drawing Stormtroopers and Darth Vader and R2D2 and attempting a Chewbacca. Kubert once stood behind me and huffed something about one of my Stormtroopers. I can't remember what. This would have been 1978, so there were still a lot of authentic hippies in existence wearing unironic beards; the older guys in the real school were doing finely rendered Tarzans or Conan the Barbarian things in pen and ink. The school had a "library" that we weren't allowed to go in, because the "library" had a lot of Playboy magazines in it, which the hippies were using for reference. You know, as models for the buxom barbarian women. With the snake coiled around a sturdy thigh.

WCP: Who are your influences?

SB: My favorite cartoonists are Charles Schulz, Robert Crumb, and probably Edward Gorey (I've recently reread some Edward Gorey and saw that he probably influenced me more than I thought). The usual. I also loved Peter Bagge's Martini Baton series of strips, and was a Hate by Bagge and Eightball by Daniel Clowes reader. Life In Hell, Mark Newgarten— alternative and underground strips were my thing when I got older, but I was and am a Peanuts fan.

WCP: How long have you been doing it?

SB: I got Clowntime published in a different, longer, eight-panel form back in the fall of 2002, originally in the Orlando Weekly. It got picked up by a small related group of newspapers out of Connecticut—the Hartford Courant, the Valley Advocate, and I think two others (that group paid me one small flat fee). The Connecticut group stuck with me until the fall of 2008—I was missing a lot deadlines. In my defense, I was in the middle of a move, but I was also burnt out. I was only able to work on my cartoons on the weekends (still the case)—I worked a full-time job (this is also still the case). On and off, I've been doing cartoons since college, where I had a strip in the George Washington University Hatchet (our student paper) for three years. The six years I worked on Clowntime previously was when I worked out a lot of my motifs and came up with a lot of my characters.

WCP: How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

SB: I print out my own custom blue-lined "boards" on Yupo, a polyprophylene "paper." I draw in blue pencil on that and ink over them with Staedtler Mars permanent ink felt-tip pens. They're slightly mushy and so not that precise, but firm enough—I am going for a very stark and simple look—I'm not looking for variation in line width. Then I scan the inked Yupo page and assemble the finished panels in Photoshop. I have libraries of digital character heads and props which I reuse—each head will be made up of Photoshop layers with different mouth types, and a movable pupil, etc. My panels are sort of assembled as "sets" in which elements of them can be moved around, and the figures stand in those sets. It's sort of like Colorforms, if anybody remembers those—where there was a scene printed waxed cardboard and you stuck these little plastic figures and props over the scene. I don't know if this saves me any time, but it does make it easier to switch out text—I am editing and rewriting my strips all the way through producing them, sometimes. I would love to one day draw everything directly into the computer, but those Wacom tablets are never comfortable—an iPad would be ideal, but you still can't draw will directly onto one, as far as I know. I still like the contact of pen and paper. Pen and Yupo. If I could do it all on computer, I could assembly my cartoons anywhere, with a lot less equipment (now I have to lug my laptop, a portable scanner, pens, pencils, paper, etc.)

WCP: What other type of cartooning or illustration do you do?

SB: I started out doing editorial illustrations for my college paper and did so for a variety of papers, mostly alternatives ones, for a couple of decades. Usually very cartoony stuff.

I had an internship at an advertising firm during my senior year in college—they hired me for a few small things which paid more money than I ever made for an editorial illustration. That firm filed for bankruptcy not long after I graduated and I was only paid a portion of what they finally owed me. I hated advertising illustration—it's utterly corrupt. I was told things like, "Could you make it look more like a Gary Larson?" when drawing a cartoon cow, for instance—a cow which was packing its bags because it was mortally afraid of the Marriott corporations' amazingly low deals on steak dinners. I had to fight those requests to blatantly rip off somebody's style as best I could. I never did very many of these advertising illos, maybe three or four. Years later my parents, who were living in upstate N.Y., saw that cow illustration in their local pennysaver, stolen by a resourceful paste-up artist for a restaurant ad. I was kind of flattered! That was a fairly common practice—I had done it myself at the New York Press, putting ads together in the production department. Usually you were just clipping the "free" clip art somebody else had clipped. But who knows? The whole thing made me feel disgusting.

My first job out of college, and the best job I ever had, was with the Washington City Paper, and it wasn't very long after I started (in production) that the art director, Mark Jenkins, and the editor, Jack Shafer, hired me to do illustrations. They (and my GWU Hatchet editors) gave me my real start. I was doing illustrations for Loose Lips at first but I begged off after awhile—I felt like a fraud doing political cartoons, particularly cartoons about local D.C. politics, which I was not following very closely. They weren't my thing. I did some illustration for New York Press, where I also worked in production. I was there when the very talented Michael Kupperman was doing a lot of illustrations for them; also Danny Hellman and a slew of others—it was a great venue for cartoonists. Kaz, Ben Katchor etc. were being published in the New York Press then. This was in the early- to mid-1990s. Mike Gentile was the art director.

I illustrated the syndicated column News of the Weird for decades, for both Washington City Paper and the Chicago Reader. Eventually Washington City Paper decided to stop paying for new illos and just ran the same illo every week. About three or four or five years ago I asked for a raise from the Reader, from the $30 per illo I was getting, got rejected, and stopped doing it. Papers were collapsing; there was no more money in them.

But I was never a very good illustrator. I never really liked doing them. There was even a period after my parents died when I could barely concentrate and I had to change my style to something way more loose, which I could dash out at one go, my mind was so shot; I could barely stand my limited style—and I'd never truly nailed one down, which you've gotta do. Mike Gentile at the New York Press stuck with me through this period—I have to thank him for that. I'd wanted to do cartoons instead, all along. But drawing for the News of the Weird was like taking a weekly class in drawing—the variety of objects and situations I had to draw was wide in range. Even if a lot of the situations involved very dumb criminals. I'm glad I did that for so long. I got decent at it, but never that great at it.

WCP: What do you think the future of comics will be?

SB: I'm not one to ask; I wouldn't presume to know. In the middle 1990s I did some limited animations for Blender, a CD-Rom "magazine"—remember those? It was a terrible experience. My cartoons were clunky, and then to animate them, you had to deliver the files to a programmer, who set them up in a program called Director; you had to leave all the timing of your gags that person; the timing, the syncing of the sound, etc. I had to record sounds! I just used my own voice sped up for the character's voice—for my main Clowntime guy. My thing was panned by a reviewer for Wired.

In early 2009 I tried to get a slightly cleaned up version of Clowntime syndicated as a daily, just as all dailies were dying hard. No dice. Then I entered that Washington Post competition for their next 'great' daily cartoonist and, to nobody's surprise, was not chosen. I wasn't even included in their round-up of honorable mentions! Thanks Garry Trudeau, et al.

I knew I was a long shot, but my thinking was, "Newspapers are going under. Maybe they are willing to try something new? Clowntime is not Cathy. Although they are not entirely dissimilar!" Yeah: I thought I was the future of cartoons! I thought wrong!

I have a lot more thoughts about where comics are now. When I sent the link to my Clowntime Comics site to a friend of mine, I joked, "Ask me how I feel about graphic novels!" (go there and and read my "ads" and you'll see what I'm talking about). I'm fairly cranky on the topic. I like short form comics, like the dailies...my feeling is, "Imagine if daily cartoons were any good at all: Wouldn't the world be wonderful?" Which is why I'm thrilled to be in the City Paper again—not just because it's where I started, but because they're giving our short strips a venue.

I see graphic novels as the rock opera of cartoons. Pretentious, bloated, intellectually bankrupt, and philosophically confused; terrible as art. Some graphic novels (the super-hero ones), like a lot of rock operas, value jack-off technical skill over coherence and literacy; both usually traffic in adolescent power fantasies. Calling your cartoons a "novel," like calling your suite of rock songs an opera, is to wish to cloak your work in an unearned mantle of respectability—novels, like opera, have or had a cachet with complete boobs: Automatically they think anything tagged a "novel" must be high art.

Not only is it unearned, but in my case it's unwanted.

Rock should not wish to become an art that's targeted at some complete clod's idea of an "adult," and neither should cartoons (Hey, I don't need "the man"'s seal of approval. Man!). The supposed "updating" of the idea of an "opera" or a "novel" by adding rock or drawings has failed. Also, these so-called "novels" are written by people who obviously don't read. Try one!

There are exceptions I have enjoyed, but usually in parts, at best. People seem to love them, though! I am aware that I am spitting into the wind. Would that be the correct cliché? Swimming against the tide, then. I just don't see graphic novels as vital (even though they may be "the future"). I see them as utterly dreadful as a reading experience. Even the alternative ones, which Harvey Pekar had a lot to answer for, do not escape my condemnation—why are we subjected to a full page of a single repeated drawing of a person with a word balloon over their head? Any not-so-hot novel without pictures is better than just about every "novel" with pictures. Pekar was kind of like a fourth-rate Bukowski—Bukowski without the fucking!—and I never liked Bukowski all that much.

If I'm going to get better, or if "comics" in general are going to get better, the real me and the amorphous concept of comics are going to need more of the kind of opportunities the Washington CP is giving us. The dailies are closed to us; they're apparently for children, the elderly, and the mentally enfeebled (with Doonesbury strictly for journalists, who are a comedically challenged bunch. Am I right?). We can all self-publish digitally—but how long can any of us continue if we're always doing it for free, or a tiny amount of money? Jandos Rothstein and the WCP are doing a great thing by giving us space to do what we want to do.

WCP: When you formerly were in the paper, you first did a comic strip, and then illustrations for columns—how did this come about?

SB: Jack Shafer, the editor of the City Paper when I worked there in production, offered me a strip. I ultimately did three different strips for the Washington City Paper before I had a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized (for depression. I'm fine now!): the first was a collage thing, almost—each week was some different topic. My first one starred a character called Little Leatherface, after the guy in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the topic was capital punishment (!) (I'm against it, btw! Hurray for me!). After that, my cartoons starred a picture of a kid I clipped out of the Weekly World News. I called him Timmy. Jack Shafer had to quash that shortly thereafter—I mean, you can't base a strip around a picture of an actual person walking around somewhere, much less a child. I was a weird, naive dude (still am?)! I think I didn't even believe in copyright law very much back then—what an ass I was! The third iteration was called Refrigerator Johnny and starred the guy who stars in Clowntime now. There were some different characters, like a buddy he had named "Hitpoints Charlie," who was a fantasy-role-playing-game enthusiast who'd had a lobotomy.

Years after my breakdown I had to just piece myself together and wasn't doing any strips.

Jack Shafer let me try and try and try, and I'll forever be grateful that he indulged me. It couldn't have been easy.

WCP: If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?

SB: I would have never stopped doing cartoons. I gave it up for awhile when I was young and was briefly living at home (when I was 27). It's harder to stop and start again than to just keep doing cartoons. But I don't ever really think to much about that kind of thing. I don't have much of a "career" to change. How about "I wish I had a career in comics"?

WCP: What work are you best-known for?

SB: People seem to remember Refrigerator Johnny. I still get emails from people who remember my first go-around at the Washington City Paper.

WCP: What work are you most proud of?

SB: I'm most proud of my most recent Clowntime Comics, the four-panel strips. There was a point when I was still doing a longer version of Clowntime (about eight panels) that I felt I'd have to redo every one of them. Every single one of them seemed to need a nip, a tuck, an edit, a partial or full rewrite. There were good bits in a lot of them, but they all sort of got away from me. I like the tighter form. I like what I've got up on my website so far.

WCP: What would you like to do  or work on in the future?

SB: I'd like to keep doing Clowntime and expand on my website—I'd like strips to link to other comics that link to other comics—sort of fill out a whole insane little online cartoon world. I enjoy doing the joke "ads" for my site and the "extras."

WCP: What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?

SB: It's hard to accept when you're on deadline, but sleep is the best cure. I tend to be able to solve a problem quickly the morning after I've struggled all day with it. Also, taking a walk. Get out of the house and take a walk. Bring some tiny pad—I'll sometimes be out around town standing on corners scribbling dick jokes into a tiny pad, in a dick-joke-writing fever. I tend to come up with ideas when I have nothing to write them down on, and I have to repeat them in my mind until I reach a piece of paper and a pad. I keep slightly bananas notebooks in which I jot down ideas and crackpot theories and musings; I have a stack of them from down through the years, and I'll comb through them for inspiration when I'm stuck.

WCP: Do you have any favorite things about D.C.?

SB: In college we used to get anybody who visited us drunk, then take them down to the Vietnam Memorial at night, and they would sob. I mean, we didn't mean for them to sob; that wasn't our intent. But we'd get drunk and tell them they had to see it (it was new then). Invariably, once they were down in the middle where the list of the dead rises above your head, they would sob. That's a great memorial!

I liked the way I could walk around the Northwest, where I lived, over on 15th and Swann; you could walk it easily and go meet friends—felt like living in a large neighborhood. We'd all meet up at Fox & Hounds at night. That kind of living goes away when you get older. I didn't appreciate it at the time all that much—that was just post-collegiate living. It was nice—I saw so much more of my friends back then.

I liked seeing bands at the 9:30 Club—that's near where the CP offices used to be. I once saw Public Enemy there, complete with Professor Griff and the S1Ws. I quite enjoyed the after-hours club I joined, briefly, where they'd lock you in after 2 a.m., and you could drink until 6 a.m. I only did that once or twice. But that was fun—that was somewhere over on 14th Street.

We used to drive out to Silver Spring, Bethesda, and Wheaton to comic book stores, or take the Metro to Alexandria (is that possible?) where there was one; I bought all my Weirdos when I lived in D.C.—I think I have them all—also most of my Hates and Eightballs and Chester Brown (Yummy Fur) cartoons. I forgot to mention how much I like Chester Brown's work. His version of the Gospels with his dark and angry Jesus—those I enjoyed. I only got into underground comics once I was in college; out in the woods of Jersey they were mostly unknown to me. I did a lot of catching up on cartoons with one of my buddies from GWU, who was a freak for everything from the 1960s—the music, the comics, the war.

I liked the Ethiopian restaurant(s) up in Adams Morgan. For a suburban kid, that was an exotic thing.

WCP: Least favorite?

SB: Well, the summers for one, which everybody says, but they are ungodly humid. There were a lot of drugs and violence at the time I was there (from 1984 to 1988 for college, then 1988 to 1992 fulltime, afterward). Guys played dice against the wall beneath the window of my 15th and Swann apartment; guys passed out drunk on the sidewalk; I found a shotgun shell in the dryer in the laundry room, and one day I came home to police tape around my entranceway: drug dealers on the second floor had been murdered and one had stumbled downstairs, past my first-floor bedroom and died in the street. I went inside and watched my own apartment being featured on the local news.

D.C. also shut down at night, mostly. K Street area cleared out on weekends. It was kind of dead. I hear that now, the 14th Street corridor has hopping nightlife; back then it was just scary.

Most of the food: There didn't seem to be anything decent. D.C. loves its mayonnaise. I really dislike mayonnaise. The default food seemed to be a not-very-good BBQ.

This was the impetus: One of Washington City Paper's critics saw a play there, reacted strongly during the first act, tweeted about it during intermission, and then sat down for the rest of the performance. Later, several actors from the show who like to avoid reading reviews came across the social-media-delivered theater criticism, and registered complaints with the theater's top brass. The theater wasn't furious: It just hoped to hear what, exactly, was my tweeting policy. After all, it had credentialed the critic to review the play in City Paper's pages, not on social media.

So I leveled with the theater: I don't have a policy on Twitter.

In this case, I told the theater in a second conversation, my critic was in the clear: The show had already opened, other publications' reviews had run, and he was voicing an unusually visceral reaction to a button-pushing play. (By the way: I realize how annoyingly vague this all is, but I have three capital-C theater critics, two of them use Twitter, and if you want, you can probably figure it out.)

But criticism, like every form of written journalism, is no longer delivered solely via articles. Twitter is a huge boon to rock critics, who live-tweet shows. Movie critics are in a trickier position, since their reviews are explicitly embargoed. (Not that this stops them from tweeting snappy one-liners after a screening.)

It's less clear-cut, I think, with theater. In Washington, critics are generally invited to a press performance over the weekend; the play will have already been in previews for a few days, and will "open" sometime early in the following week. Generally, there are no performances between the press showing and opening night, after which the reviews start appearing.

After the opening—that's a tradition that's held since the days when critics weren't let in to see a performance until opening night, Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks reminded me last week. "I grew up in an environment where there are embargoes until opening night, and those seem to have developed as a way of putting everyone on a level playing field," he said. "Those have changed for everyone except for official critics."

Marks gave an example: He recently attended a press performance of The Pitmen Painters in New York, and found himself sitting behind Andy Cohen, who hosts the interview show "Watch What Happens Live" on Bravo. "He tweeted right afterward," Marks said. "I was not allowed to do that by the rules [critics] follow."

Does the Post have rules for Twitter? "I don’t know a specific policy," Marks said. "My standard, and I assume the paper’s standard, is I don’t tweet reviews." Once the review runs, he'll sometimes use his Twitter account to direct followers to the Post's website.

Marks isn't a prolific tweeter. Two of Washington City Paper's critics are, though you generally won't read their opinions until their reviews run. There are exceptions, like when they attended Shakespeare Theatre Company's all-day press performance of the three-part The Great Game: Afghanistan at Harmon Hall recently. For the most part, their tweets had to do with the oddities and discomforts of being in the same room all day.

Maura Judkis, TBD's theater reporter (and a former WCP contributor) was tweeting from the Harmon that day, too. Like me, her editor Andrew Beaujon (also formerly of WCP) doesn't have a policy on tweeting from press performances. He said tweeting critical reactions could be problematic but said some kinds of tweets can be valuable. TBD's theater tweets, he said, generally take a more experiential than critical approach. "[Judkis] doesn’t tweet reviews because she doesn’t do reviews, but she does tweet theater news," Beaujon said, adding that she still brings a strong perspective: "She has a good critical voice."

Beaujon said that for D.C. theaters, the issue is mostly an abstract one. "You don’t see that many people tweeting about theater anyway—it’s not really an audience that’s engaged in social media," he said. "Theater has never had to think about Twitter. It's hard for theaters or critics to think outside the 1,000-word review."

He's probably right. I contacted two theaters in town, and neither had a policy on Twitter. Here's what Studio Theatre's director for communications, Liane Jacobs, wrote:

We don’t currently have an official policy about tweeting except of course that The Studio Theatre does not allow the use of cell phones during performances out of respect for the actors and the audience.

That said, we aren’t fans of critics’ tweeting. We sincerely appreciate the well-considered reactions and opinions that a full review provides. Short, quick tweets, unlike full reviews, don’t allow the reviewer to put his or her response in a larger context.

At the beginning of our conversation, Alli Houseworth, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's communications and new media manager, said she and the theater weren't completely comfortable with criticism in tweet form but that neither had come down definitively. "One can ask, What is the difference between a critic and Joe Schmoe tweeting? That’s sort of the world that we live in now and I don’t know the answer," she said.

Then she stopped speaking for Woolly. "The radical part of my brain is like: Why don’t we encourage it?" she said. "I feel like—and I would have to ask permission before doing this—but I do sort of like that idea."

That's where I think I come down, too. By the time critics attend a press performance, a play is finished (insofar as it's ever finished), and waiting until opening night to hit "publish" is a formality. Besides: I trust City Paper's critics to be as intelligent on Twitter as they are in a review. (And the latter medium reaches many more eyeballs than the former. If you follow theater critics on Twitter, you're probably a pretty engaged consumer of theater. You'll read the review anyway.)

And there's something special, particularly in the case of a challenging work, about working out a critical opinion in real time.

The theater that originally called me agreed, at least partially. Its representative told me: "In this case it only generated more conversation, which is a good thing."

In City Lights: John Anderson reviews shows at the National Museum of Health and Medicine and at Glenview Manson. Plus! D.C.'s Black Sox, Tears for Fears, Gullah, Twelfth Night, and—seriously—Ke$ha.

Ben Claassen III

Washington City Paper: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

Ben Claassen III: I draw the weekly strip Dirtfarm and also illustrate the advice column Baggage Check which runs weekly in the free daily paper, the Express.

WCP: When and where were you born?

BCIII: 1977—New Orleans.

WCP: Why are you in Washington now?  What neighborhood or area do you live in?

BCIII: I actually live in Baltimore now (in Hampden), but I used to live in a group house near College Park that was called "The Dirtfarm". I originally moved to D.C. in 2000 with a girl, and then to Baltimore with another girl in 2006.

WCP: What is your training and/or education in cartooning?

BCIII: Ha. I don't know actually. High school? I guess my brother and I started drawing to amuse ourselves & tune out certain situations at a really early age, and then for me it just kind of became a coping mechanism for tuning out any and all situations.

I guess I've gotten a lot better at cartooning over the years, or at least have found good ways to cheat. At one point about 10 years ago, I went to Comicon in San Diego for the first time and had the big realization that I'd never really be able to draw as well as 99 percent of the people who can "really" draw comics. That was a big eye opener for me, so I decided to instead focus on the things I thought I could do well, mainly overexaggerating body language and facial expressions, and hopefully, more than anything, try to get better at the writing process, which tends to come and go.

WCP: Who are your influences?

BCIII: I'm influenced by a lot of people, cartoonists and non: Jim Henson and Frank Oz, B. Kliban, Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Paul Reubens, Matt Groening, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Gary Panter, John Pound, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson... This list could easily stretch on for several pages.

WCP: If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?

BCIII: I don't really like to think in terms of regrets. I do like to complain a lot for the simple joy of complaining, but I'm pretty happy with where I am. I can't imagine changing any of the choices I've made, good or bad. All of them have led me here, and here is pretty good.

WCP: What work are you best-known for?

BCIII: Probably the comic. Or for illustrating Wil Wheaton's first book Dancing Barefoot. Or maybe for painting all the paintings that are in the Galaxy Hut in Arlington?

WCP: What work are you most proud of?

BCIII: I'm proud of all of it, but the comic is probably the thing I'm most proud of, even though I usually hate most of them when they're done. I'm amazed I've been able to keep doing it for this long. 5-plus years of weekly deadlines is kind of mind-boggling.

I do end up liking a lot of them later, but usually for different reasons from what was originally intended. Most things seem to only be funny to me for a split second, and then the rest is more like grunt work where hopefully I can keep the original spark of "funny" intact throughout the process. That doesn't always happen. Things get mutated and mangled into other things quite a lot—sometimes with good results and sometimes not.

I guess to pinpoint it though, I'm most proud of the few that still consistently make me laugh—the ones that have been put into a good enough framework in which to make other people consistently laugh as well. Watching someone laugh at something you've made is quite possibly the best thing in the world.

WCP: What would you like to do or work on in the future?

BCIII: I mainly just hope I can keep doing what I'm doing. I'm sure my idea of what "funny" is will change over the years, but I hope I can draw the comic forever. It makes next to nothing in terms of money, but that has never mattered much to me.

I guess I've always also imagined trying to make the jump to cartoons and films, or maybe children's books. I don't think anyone hasn't thought about those things though. We'll see...

WCP: What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?

BCIII: Pull my hair out. Curse at things. Chase the cat out of the room for no reason. Dig through years and years of backlogged ideas that I now hate. Threaten to quit forever. Say "why do I do this!?" over and over...

And then hopefully settle down a little bit, remember more or less why I do it, get totally delirious, and ideally relax enough to say "fuck it" and just see what happens.

Seriously though, I don't think I'm ever not in a rut or don't have writer's block. I think writer's block is the natural state of things. It's the few & fleeting moments of clarity that are rare & make things happen. I have to force it all with deadlines. I wouldn't be able to do anything without deadlines. Everything I do is done a few hours before a deadline, which forces me to live in the moment. I stay up all night and just hope for the best.

WCP: What do you think will be the future of your field?

BCIII: Comics and satire aren't going to go anywhere. They'll spill over into whatever mediums the future has to offer, whether paid or not. There will always be something to laugh at, and comics are one of the cheapest, quickest, most effective ways available for presenting an idea. I'm sure people will be drawing comics making fun of the apocalypse as it's happening. I would hope so anyway.

WCP: What's your favorite thing about D.C.?

BCIII: I love DC.

I love the seriousness of it. D.C. has a pretty good mix of intelligent and stupid people, but it seems that deep down everyone has a pretty general love and respect for one another.

I guess my favorite thing about D.C. would have to be the events which bring out a mix of the general public to put all of that on display. Events like Crafty Bastards, outdoor movies, festivals on the mall...

Or how about the night Obama was elected? That was pretty much the most fun night/week ever in terms of the general public going wild. I guess that's actually my favorite thing about New Orleans, or really any other city, as well. I love to see people who probably wouldn't ordinarily socialize with each other get wild and drunk together and high five one other and dance in the streets.

WCP: Least favorite?

BCIII: I guess my least favorite would be all the things that hold back all of the above from happening. I always wished there were more eccentric people in DC, or at least more silly people here,  to stir things up & get people out of their little private bubbles.

I also always wished that more things were 24-hours and that bars and the Metro never closed. That's yet another fantasy left over from growing up in New Orleans though I think.

WCP: What monument or museum do you take most out-of-town guests to?

BCIII: I quite like the echo chamber that's in front of the Canadian Embassy. I used to like to go there in the middle of the night with a guitar.

Other favorite spots include the Value Village on University Avenue, the Astor in Adams Morgan, Negril in Silver Spring, Ben's Chili Bowl, Galaxy Hut, the Black Cat, the 94th Aero Squadron, College Park Diner, Fort Reno, and the bike path that goes from Bethesda to Georgetown.

WCP: Do you have a website or blog?

BCIII: Yup. www.bendependent.com

See that handsome grey lady? That's today's edition of the Chosun Ilbo, a Fairfax-based Korean-language daily that figures prominently in Mike Paarlberg's story this week about a controversial four-day Kennedy Center concert featuring the Little Angels, the children's song and dance troupe that has been the cultural arm of the Unificification Church since the 1960s. See, the Chosun Ilbo's been taking some heat from area Korean churches recently because its parent company is sponsoring the concert, which falls on the 60-year anniversary of the start of the Korean War—the Unification Church's leader, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, has been moving closer to North Korea in recent years, which hasn't pleased some in the Korean diaspora.

Anyway, Paarlberg interviewed one critic of the concert, Rev. Jang Y. Lee of the Virginia Korean Baptist Church in Fairfax Station, at the Chosun Ilbo office. Reporters there snapped a pic (right) and dropped it above the fold on A1, along with a screenshot of this blog and an article about our article, which is partially about their newspaper. Totally. Fucking. Meta.

The headline translates to: "Mainstream US newspaper reports on dispute over the Little Angels performance." The subhead: "The Washington City Paper analyzes incensed atmosphere within the Korean community."

The Chosun Ilbo article then refers to Washington City Paper as "an influential newspaper in the Washington area." And the photo caption refers to our article as "special," and to Paarlberg simply as "reporter Mike."

But tonight we're manufacturing a rivalry—because there are no worthy basketball games to watch, because I wanted a reason to change out of my pajamas, and because Mark Williams invited us to do so. Malitz and I will square off over a set of turntables at Gate 54/St. Ex as part of the monthly DJ night Procedure.

If we can figure out how to work them, that is.

You are invited to have a beer and sit in close proximity to this epic showdown. You think that two-hour Joanna Newsom record is pretentious? We'll see how you feel after hearing Malitz play three straight hours of Felt b-sides. Did I mention there's no cover?

Procedure ft. David Malitz & Aaron Leitko
10 p.m., Free
Cafe Saint Ex
1847 14th Street, NW

(Photo: Valerie Paschall)

D.C. newspapers have devoted less space to comics in recent years.

Ladies and gentleman,

As we take stock of this great nation of ours, it is evident that one group is suffering—a surprising group given its mission. Cartoonists are under siege in this great capital of ours.

If we examine who was appearing in our newspapers in May 2007, the last date we have statistics for, we find a relatively thriving local market. A look at January 2010 shows a much-diminished field.

Using an unscientific scale of one point per cartoonist and one per syndicated page of comics, let's take a look at both dates.

MAY 2007

Washington Post (15 points)

• Tom Toles: editorial cartoonist (semi-daily)
• Richard Thompson: Richard’s Poor Almanac (Saturdays); Cul de Sac strip (Sunday’s Magazine), illustrations for Joel Achenbach’s "Rough Draft" column (Sunday’s Magazine) (three points)
• Rob Shepperson, Tim Grajek: illustrations for Sunday's Business section (.5 points)
• Nick Galifianakis: cartoons for Carolyn Hax's "Tell Me About It" advice column
• Bob Staake: cartoons for "Style Invitational" contest (Sunday Saturday)
• Patrick M. Reynolds: Flashback comic strip; unique Washington version (Sunday comics)
• Eric Shansby: illustrations for Gene Weingarten’s "Below the Beltway" column (Sunday’s Magazine)
• Christopher Gash, Christoph Niemann: spot illos, especially on Sunday
• Michael Cavna: editorial cartoons in Arts section, extremely irregularly (.5 points)
• Julie Zhu: Montgomery Blair High School student cartoonist for "Extra Credit" column in local Extra sections
• Saturday box of syndicated editorial cartoons
• Turkish cartoonist Selcuk Demirel illustrations in Book World, semi-regularly
• Two pages of syndicated comic strips
• Two Sunday sections of comic strips

Washington Times (four points)

• Bill Garner: editorial cartoonist
• Joseph Szadkowski: "Zadzooks" column on comic books (Saturday)
• Large array of editorial cartoons and illustrations every day
• One page of syndicated comic strips

Washington Examiner (daily, except Sundays) (one point; had already dropped three pages of comic strips by this date)

• Nate Beeler: editorial cartoonist (semi-daily); alternates with syndicated cartoonists.

Washington City Paper (Friday-only paper) (seven points)

• Shawn Belschwender: "News of the Weird" column illustrator, unique to WCP
• Ben Claasen III: Dirtfarm comic strip, unique to WCP; advertising illustrations
• Joe Sayers: thingpart comic strip
• Slug Signorino: "The Straight Dope" syndicated column illustrator
• Robert Ullman: "Savage Love" column illustrator, unique to WCP
• Max Kornell, Josh Neufeld: article illustrations
• Syndicated comic strips: The City by Derf, Red Meat by Max Cannon, Ernie Pook’s Comeek by Lynda Barry, and Lulu Eightball by Emily Flake. (Ted Rall was dropped earlier in 2007)

Express (two points)

• Eric Reece: illustration for Baggage Check advice column (Tuesday)
• Six syndicated comic strips

Washington Blade (two points—one for editorial and one for strips)

• No regular cartoonist. Runs one syndicated editorial cartoon and six syndicated strips— Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, Jane’s World by Paige Braddock (2002 strips), Chelsea Boys by Glen Hanson and Allan Neuwirth, Troy by Michael Derry, Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast by Greg Fox, and Adam & Andy by James Asal.

The Hill (one point)

• Chris Weyant: editorial cartoonist for Weyant’s World.

The Politico (two points—they run cartoons on the front page)

• Matt Wuerker: editorial cartoons, column-heading caricatures, maps.

The Onion (national, not local content) (2 points)

• Sean Kelly: fictional editorial cartoonist; actually by Ward Sutton;
• Syndicated strips: Postage Stamp Funnies by Shannon Wheeler, The Leftersons by Colin T. Hayes, Wondermark by David Malki, The Spats, Cathy by Cathy Guisewhite (in Spanish) and Red Meat by Max Cannon

Total: 35 points

**

JANUARY 2010

Washington Post (12.66 points)

• Ann Telnaes: animated editorial cartoons on Web site) (one point)
• Tom Toles: editorial cartoonist (semi-daily) (one point)
• Richard Thompson: Richard’s Poor Almanac (Saturdays); "Cul de Sac" strip (Sunday’s Style section, only in color sometimes) (down to 1.5 points from three—we've not seen RPA this year)
• Rob Shepperson, Tim Grajek: Gone? (zero points)
• Nick Galifianakis: cartoons for Carolyn Hax's "Tell Me About It" advice column (one point)
• Bob Staake: cartoons for "Style Invitational" contest (Sunday Saturday) (one point)
• Patrick M. Reynolds: Flashback comic strip; unique Washington version (Sunday comics) (one point)
• Eric Shansby: illustrations for Gene Weingarten’s "Below the Beltway" column (Sunday Magazine) (one point)
• Christopher Gash, Christopher Niemann: spot illos especially on Sunday (one point)
• Michael Cavna: blogging at "Comics Riffs" (one point)
• Julie Zhu: Montgomery Blair High School student cartoonist for "Extra Credit" column in local Extra sections (one point)
• Saturday box of syndicated editorial cartoons (one point)
• Cartoonists in Book World: section dropped (zero points)
• Two pages of syndicated comic strips, drastically reduced in size (.66 points)
• One Sunday sections of comic strips (.5 points)

Washington Times (one point)

• Joseph Szadkowski: "Zadzooks" column on comic books.

Washington Examiner (daily, except Saturdays) (one point)

• Nate Beeler: editorial cartoonist (semi-daily); alternates with syndicated cartoonists

Washington City Paper (Friday-only paper) (3.5 points)

• Slug Signorino – "The Straight Dope" column illustrator
• Ben Claasen III – "Dirtfarm" comic strip, unique to WCP; advertising illustrations
• Occasional illustrators such as Robert Ullman for articles
• Rhode’s comics articles (one point)

Express (1.33 points)

• Ben Claasen III: illustration for "Baggage Check" advice column (Tuesday)
• Two syndicated comic strips (Pearls Before Swine, Pooch Cafe).

Washington Blade (zero points): out of business

The Hill (one point)

• Chris Weyant: editorial cartoonist for Weyant’s World.

The Politico (two points— they still run him on the front page)

• Matt Wuerker: editorial cartoons, column-heading caricatures, maps.

The Onion (national, not local content) (.166 points)

• "Sean Kelly” editorial cartoonist (missing for all of January 2010);
• Syndicated strips: Red Meat by Max Cannon (loss of five other strips).

Total: 22.656 points

We are only 65 percent as good as 2007. In just two short years, we have lost an astounding 35 percent of our weekly comics content. While we have gained the regular cartoons of Ms. Telnaes and the blog of Mr. Cavna, that has not been enough to offset the drastic losses we have suffered. This cannot stand, and this shall not stand. I am immediately proposing a Works Progress Administration-type stimulus package to keep our nation's cartoonists dutifully employed in keeping our citizens entertained. Thank you and good night.

Above: Photoshop wizardry by William Atwood Mitchell

This past weekend, we learned that former Washington City Paper music critic Rickey Wright had died. I put together a tribute of sorts made from Wright's blog posts and WCP pieces, tributes from friends and colleagues and family.

On Saturday afternoon, I had the fortune of talking with Nicole Arthur. Arthur served as Washington City Paper's Arts Editor in 1994 and 1995. It was around that time that Wright began reviewing records for us. This was a time when people wanted to be rock critics, when there was space for such writing, when there was competition to review the big records. And Wright reviewed his share of the big records.

But Arthur was more than just an editor to Wright. She was a friend. The two had struck up a friendship in the '80s. Of course, it started over music.

On Sunday, Arthur e-mailed me some of her many memories of Wright:

"I met Rickey in Richmond, Va., in 1987. I had written a record review for VCU's student newspaper, which I'm pretty sure was the first thing I ever wrote for publication, and he wrote me a fan letter. He had already graduated at that point, and he was working at Peaches Records & Tapes. We met soon thereafter and were fast friends; I think it was our shared reverence for Love's "Forever Changes" that sealed the deal. But back to that fan letter — turns out it was completely in character. Rickey had an amazing generosity of spirit; he constantly encouraged other writers and he was a tireless cheerleader for his friends. If you happened to fall into both categories, you were very lucky indeed.

Unlike most critics, Rickey was not a music snob. He would gladly discuss Nick Drake for hours (and it would be hours — he *loved* to talk), but he would just as gladly discuss Def Leppard. He never wrote anything off because it was "uncool." I once complained about my daughter listening to the Wiggles, and he leapt to their defense: "They're a classic four-piece pop combo!" This is not to say that he was not discriminating, he was. He once wrote a John Mayer review so brutal, the story goes, that Mayer cited it in interviews as an example of his being eviscerated by the press.

Rickey was a master of the soon-to-be-lost art of making mix tapes; he had a great instinct for implausible-seeming combinations that somehow complemented one another. I'm looking at the list of artists on one of the tapes he made me — the Raspberries, Professor Longhair, Love and Rockets, Roger Miller, Prince, Roseanne Cash. And it's amazing; I've been listening to it for 20 years."

Former Washington City Paper music critic Rickey Wright is dead.  Wright passed away at 4:31 p.m. on February 19 in Seattle after suffering from a series of small strokes. At the time of his death, he was working on a book about John Lennon's "Imagine."

Wright was probably one of the most prolific talents the Washington City Paper has ever had perhaps on par with Jenkins, and the great, beloved Joel S. I never met Wright but I was around when he was around in the mid-to-late '90s. I marveled at the fact that he could write on just about any band or genre and not appear to sweat it. (Most of us sweat it).

Wright's prose was effortless and to the point. He didn't mess around with silly metaphors. Nor did he make you feel stupid (he never loaded his pieces with arcane references to deep cuts, alternate Replacements b-sides, etc.). He just wrote and wrote.

"He was a save-your-ass kind of writer," recalls former Washington City Paper Arts Editor Glenn Dixon. "If someone didn't come through, and there were constantly people who didn't come through, Rickey would do the job. He'd write it well. He'd get it in on time—always. He was never without ideas and he could cover any kind of music. I can't tell you how rare that is. I'm really sorry."

Wright penned pieces on everything from Travolta to Ben Lee to all of pop music in 1997 to Metallica and Soundgarden to R.E.M. to Charles Mingus to Johnny Cash to Led Zep to Curtis Mayfield and Millie Jackson to Luna and Teenage Fanclub to Wesley Willis to British ska to all of '90s rock to G. Love to Boston to the Shangri-Las to the Replacements. Wright's final posting on his Facebook page was a list of his 12 favorite Beatles covers; he included two remakes of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."

Idolator had this to say about Wright's passing:

"Wright was an editor for Amazon for some time (that job brought him to Seattle), and his work appeared in publications like USA Today, the Village Voice, Blender, Harp, and the Seattle Weekly. He also won the 1999 Rhino Music Aptitude Test, a fact that seems somewhat trivial at first glance, but if you've actually seen the test or some of the people who have failed it miserably, you realize what a testament to his musical knowledge that accolade really is."

Ned Raggett wrote up a nice obit. Fred Mills has a tribute to Wright in Blurt. Matos has a deeply personal post on Wright as well. Here's a portion of what Matos had to say:

"Rickey passed away this afternoon at 4:31. Last week he'd had a stroke–apparently more than one, all small, over a period of time–and went to the hospital for treatment. He had surgery and underwent another stroke on the table; he spent most of his final week in a coma. Our friend Rachel and I visited him yesterday. It was not as awful as I'd feared it might be: he still looked like himself, which was encouraging even if everyone knew he wasn't going to make it. It's hard not to second-guess how much of this I should be saying, mainly because Rickey was the kind of person who deserves whatever honor you can give him, especially in passing. I've seldom known a kinder person, or a better listener, or anyone more enthusiastic about music or film or whatever–and even better, his enthusiasm was catching. When I'm excited about something I yell without meaning to, or just become obnoxious about it. Rickey never did that. He didn't have to."

If you'd like to read more of Wright in his own words, you can check out his blog.

Wright's last blog post had been a hopeful one. It is dated Feb. 4. It was about Obama. He titled it "I love my president." This is what he had to say He uses the post to print a quote from Obama:

"In the past few days, I've heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place . . . I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change."

There is an obit from his former employer the Virginian-Pilot:

"'He had quite a following when he was here and was influential in the local music scene,' said former Pilot writer Earl Swift. 'I’ve never known anyone with a more encyclopedic knowledge of music.'"

There is still lots more from his friends and fellow critics. Here's a really personal recollection of Wright (I'm just quoting a small portion; you should really read the entire entry):

"Rickey used to literally rock and roll. He never stopped moving. Either his leg was always tapping or he’d rock back and forth in his chair like a baby trying to comfort himself. He had a repertoire of postures. Always leaning forward with his hand on his thigh, fingers pointed in and elbow pointed out. He used his hands when he talked, flipping his palms upward in a gesture of offering.

Rickey always looked cool. He was a rock critic and looked the part. He always had a good haircut. He always wore the cool black ankle boots with the pointed toes. He knew how to wear a suit. He walked on his toes a bit which sort of accentuated his little belly. He always had just the right rock ‘n’ roll button on his bag or his jacket.

Rickey loved his cats, Chet and Kettle. When Chet was sick, he went through tremendous lengths and expense to try to keep him alive. When Kettle ran away, he consulted a pet psychic to find her, and found her. He used to talk about what a good soul Chet had and how you could see it in the little cat’s big eyes....

Rickey and I only ever talked about two things: music and love. Our last conversation was about the latter. It occurred around the beginning of January...."

And finally, a message from Wright's aunt. She had sent out an e-mail to his friends breaking the news of his death. She writes:

"This loss is tragic. Fortunately, Rickey was able to pursue and achieve his dreams. His interest in music was evident from a very early age and has always continued, unabated. His presence in so many lives has been uniquely meaningful and has brought joy to many.

I believe sincerely that we should celebrate his life. Rickey would like that. So, I’m going to turn on some music and think of Rickey and smile.

Take care.
Deborah (Rickey’s aunt)"